EDWARD III HENRY V HENRY VI PART I the Plays Gauge the Pull of Combat on All Whom Soaked Story of Their Own Becoming, the History of Their Creation As a Nation
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OF FOREIGNAR FIRE TUGEDWARD III HENRY V W HENRY VI PART I FFTCHICAGO.COM Chicago Shakespeare Theater Proud tobeapartner with CARASCO PHOTOGRAPHY —The Merry WivesofWindsor DIRECTOR'S NOTE Welcome These histories have been living inside me for a very, very long time. Tug of War serves as a metaphor of war, of all our wars. Of Troy, Saigon, Gettysburg, Stalingrad, Somme, Kabul. Of foreign wars and civil wars, Tug of War is, for me, the history of civilization. It’s chilling to watch as history repeats itself, the repetition of themes, of human behavior, of selfish mistakes. We will see that parabola of war and peace, of why wars begin and begin again. Shakespeare weaves a counterpoint between the voices of commoners and And again. We will see the fall towards war, the collapse of moral integrity into royals. In the tension between the common soldiers who often speak in prose, war, and the striving for peace, again and again and again. And one will wonder, and the royals who speak in iambic pentameter, Shakespeare composes an opera. Why don’t we learn from our history? I imagined Tug of War as a musical history cycle, a tapestry between the music and the language, between the actors and the musicians. In their simplicity and Theater is inherently a rebellious art form. Shakespeare wrote histories because humanity, the songs you will hear are written and performed to touch us, to rally he lived in dangerous times, and so he placed these war plays safely back in time. us towards a cause, to comfort us. Shakespeare hid in his histories with “Once upon a time, a long time ago...”—and he got away with it. If Shakespeare were writing now, politicians would despise Tug of War’s first day this spring,Foreign Fire, is suffused with ghosts. The ghosts him. He wielded the weapons of language. Language was his weapon. Theater of the dead echo moments of their lives and together become a convocation renders visual what Shakespeare gave us in his words. Creativity is the enemy of among the living, because war is always haunted in this way. In the fall, Tug of War: force; art, I hope, is in the end the strongest force of all. n Civil Strife is suffused in blood. The annihilation of Britain’s proud conquest of France starts the quarrel between cousins and tips the scale into civil war. Foreign war becomes civil war. In these histories, family and nation are irrevocably interwined: what happens to one happens to the other. There’s no way ever to separate them. They’re all cousins—even the French are cousins to these English. They all have fundamentally Barbara Gaines the same last name, Plantagenet. And they hate and cherish each other for reasons Artistic Director that have an enormous amount to do with the personal. The personal is political, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Endowed Chair the political is personal. Jockeying for power is what happens at every family dinner table—except that the power struggles at the dinner tables of these dysfunctional families can tear apart entire nations in their wake. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. —GEORGE SANTAYANA 4 Spring 2016 | Tug of War: Foreign Fire www.chicagoshakes.com 5 INTRODUCING THE YARD AT CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE The Yard will be Chicago Shakespeare’s third stage. Together with its two existing performance spaces, The Yard will amplify the Theater's artistic vision and community impact. Introducing a new trend in theater architecture to Chicago, the design features a series of mobile “towers” that allow for The Yard to be configured in a variety of shapes and sizes, with audience capacities ranging from 150–850. www.chicagoshakes.com/yard THE JOHN W. AND JEANE M. ROWE INQUIRY AND EXPLORATION SERIES Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare continues to raise questions, arguments, and point/ counterpoints among—and sometimes between—scholars and theater practitioners. The same script through different lenses reveals itself in a myriad of ways—leaving us, the readers of text and performance, to think and rethink our own points of view. Such is the legacy that Shakespeare left us. We hope that our program notes enrich, deepen, and sometimes even challenge—our audiences’ experience with the production they witness. TUGS Visit chicagoshakes.com to explore more ideas n Tug of War the tugs are many: on the and stories behind the art on CST’s stages. Imonarchs and other mortals who people the plays, on Shakespeare, and on us. closer to home, and closer in time; it enabled him to show his audiences the blood- TUG OF WAR: FOREIGN FIRE EDWARD III HENRY V HENRY VI PART I The plays gauge the pull of combat on all whom soaked story of their own becoming, the history of their creation as a nation. (From n BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE it exhilarates and ruins: on the English kings who an American vantage, it would be as though a present-day playwright were to track n ADAPTED AND DIRECTED BY generation after generation feel tugged toward France, our history from Jamestown to World War II, focusing most intently on the span BARBARA GAINES seeking to reclaim it (through William the Conqueror) as stretching from the Revolutionary through the Civil Wars; Francis Ford Coppola and n COURTYARD THEATER their distant birthright; on their English subjects, drawn n MAY 12–JUNE 12, 2016 Tony Kushner have each claimed Shakespeare as precedent for their own history by ambition or obligation into a cycle of foreign war and n 312.595.5600 cycles, The Godfather and Angels in America.) n WWW.CHICAGOSHAKES.COM civil strife that seems to have no end; and on the millions In the end, Shakespeare out-cycled Marlowe fivefold; he wrote or collaborated past and present whom they here stand in for, whose on eleven plays named for English kings. (Marlowe soon enough paid him the propensity for war, throughout the long play of history, compliment of imitation, in a play called Edward II.) And because he continued to has proven so intense that they have barely paused to write them (not always in chronological order) from the beginning through the end imagine a world without it. of his two decades in theater, they came to constitute his most capacious laboratory, The plays record a more local cluster of tugs also, exerted the place where he first discovered and most persistently developed his own art. on and in and by the playwright who crafted them. No In the three plays compassed in Tug’s first day, that laboratory is already working at one can say for certain what impulses and circumstances full capacity. Even in Henry VI, Part One, for example—Tug’s third play but perhaps pulled William Shakespeare, somewhere in his middle the playwright’s very first—Shakespeare is spectacularly alert to the ways recurrent twenties, into the vortex of the London theater. It’s a patterns of word and action can subliminally shape the audience’s experience of Stuart Sherman, who little easier to guess what prompted him at the very war’s compulsions. As the English army struggles to reconquer France, three French contributes this essay, start of his career to embark on a series of plays about and served as Scholar-in- women, in entirely separate scenes, display their striking capacity to thwart the Residence on Tug of War, English history. A few years earlier, Christopher Marlowe enemy: Joan of Arc by force of arms; the Countess of Auvergne by strategies of is a Professor of English at had scored the theater’s most formidable hit with his Fordham University and seduction; and Margaret of Anjou by a cunning so complex that it will shape four is the author of Telling two-part Tamburlaine, a pair of epic plays portraying ensuing decades of English history (and Tug’s entire second day). Time: Clocks, Diaries, and the Muslim emperor Timur the Lame, whose rise and fall English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. transpire within an ever-expanding slaughterhouse where The effect, across all these mirrored but varied scenes, is of a glittering kaleidoscope death attains perpetual dominion. spun at giddy speed, wherein the impulses of lust and combat, like bright sharp shards, converge and disperse at such a rate as to suggest that the passions can In launching a cycle of plays grounded in English history, seem at times indistinguishable as well as uncontainable. When Joan, defeated Shakespeare was making an audacious bid to outgo and condemned, leaves the stage at last, Margaret within seconds makes her first his mighty predecessor. The tactic allowed him to write 8 Spring 2016 | Tug of War: Foreign Fire www.chicagoshakes.com 9 THE JOHN W. AND JEANE M. ROWE INQUIRY AND EXPLORATION SERIES SALUTE TO SPONSORS Chicago Shakespeare Theater is proud to recognize the partnership of our leading contributors, whose visionary support ensures that Shakespeare appearance; her military ambition and efficacy over the long haul will prove lives in Chicago today and for generations to come. even more ruinous to the English, as though these dark mirrorings might replicate forever. MAJOR SEASON SUPPORTERS In Shakespeare’s work, they do. What the Shakespeare lets us history sequence most allowed the playwright learn upon our pulses and his audience to discover was the power of such repetitions and resonance not only within the terrible beauty of a single play but across them too. In all three history as theater, of the first day’s plays, Shakespeare shows us theater as history. ardor and violence inextricably intertwined.